So, what makes one generic love story better than another generic love story? Well, one thing is the characters. The characters are surprisingly well-developed, using stock archetypes as a template to build the characters from, instead of as a shortcut to avoid any of that difficult character development. Our first stock character is Misaki, the tsundere. She is portrayed as an amazingly strong girl, who excels at everything she does and hates men. Our second stock character is Usui, who is the aloof cool-guy. He is portrayed as utterly perfect, besting everyone in physical strength, charm, and skills. So, basically, this is an anime about two perfect people.
This isn't that strange, if this were, for example, a battle anime, we would expect the main characters to exceed mere mortals. We like to watch gods duke it out, but who likes to watch gods fall in love? Well, unlike typical battle anime where the characters gain strength and go from normal to perfect, here we have an anime that goes in the opposite direction. The characters become more human, more empathetic, the further the series goes. Misaki is completely helpless against her feelings for Usui, her physical strength and emotional resolve making it hard for her to lower her shields. Usui has some sort of troublesome past, and in general he always seems to suggest a greater depth of character if we could just pierce his surface. His actions sometimes give away how he's feeling, and reading him is just like reading a human in real life. Eventually Usui's typical patience begins to falter, and he starts showing signs of jealousy when Misaki's around other men.
Both of them are well-pronounced in their situation, it is easy to feel sympathy for either character, despite the fact that they are, technically speaking, far more perfect than most of us could ever hope to be. Usui is really cool, and his off-the-wall sense of humor makes this anime hilarious at times. Misaki is attractive as hell, and when she blushes it is almost impossible to not go “aww”. They are both sympathetic enough that viewers can express the exact same feelings as one of them. Reading other reviews and discussions in the forums often reveals that many viewers get extremely impatient with Misaki's refusal to admit her feelings, as if they were Usui, and many viewers get annoyed with Usui for being so possessive, as if they were Misaki. The thing is that they express this as a fault, whereas I consider such reactions to really show how well this show generates sympathy for the main characters.
As for the other characters, they are less fleshed out, and sometimes feel a bit too gimmicky. One of the other characters who really amused me was Misaki's sister, probably the first character who's gimmick is being hilariously boring. A lot of the scenarios were typical and bland. However, this show always has a little bit of an original twist on things, sort of playing with the tropes and stereotypes. The artwork is clean and modern, with clearly high production values and attractive character designs. The music is pretty generic and uninteresting. Overall this anime isn't good enough to be considered great, but still surprisingly high quality for what it is.
